The Ned and Daron Report: Like, Totally, Oh My God! We Saw Swimfan!

Well, the good news is that Ned’s and my plan to make millions by writing a script about Norman Reedus as a future basketball star has succeeded, and we are currently millionaires. The other good news is that now that I am a millionaire I can totally tell our current fakejazz.com editor to screw off, and that I won’t write about whomever happens to be the new uberhott teen that is making their rounds through the Hollywood machine…now, for the first time I feel like I have the financial security to focus my writing on what I want to write about.

The other good news is that a few weeks ago, I was able to use my monetary influence to acquire a seat at Radio City Music Hall for the actual live performance of MTV’s Video Music Awards, where I was able to see Michael Jackson as he came out on stage wearing gold-plated, and jewel-encrusted shin guards to accept the award for Artist of the Millennium. Now, normally that wouldn’t have been too special on its own, since I have been to hundreds of such events since becoming a millionaire, most of them attended by Michael Jackson wearing some really awesome ensemble of futuristic soccer gear. However, something really beautiful happened then, right before my eyes; a tear fell from Michael’s eye, and he, probably for the first time in years, opened up his heart to the world and to me, and proclaimed, “David Blaine, I believe in you; your magic is real!”

At that very moment, I would have given-up every single one of my one million dollars to be able to reach out, pick up Michael, and hold him like a baby in my warm, protective arms. Tears gently rolled down my satiny cheeks as I longed to wipe away his tears, let him know that everything was going to be alright, and help him have faith that people still believed in magic, and that we all knew that, like in his “Smooth Criminal” video, if he wanted to, he could still change into a beautiful, big black panther, a super fancy Delorian-type car, a huge transformer shooting lasers at underworld SWAT teams, or a shiny, metallic spaceship traveling to other planets where children are protected from vile drugs and bugs.

And, while I can’t really speak for Ned, the only really bad thing about becoming a millionaire is that you have to join one of those Millionaire Clubs, and even the least prestigious ones still make you sign an agreement to always be wearing a tuxedo. But, besides that, everything about being a millionaire seems to be going well.

Another strange but somewhat unpleasant thing that’s happened in the last few weeks is that I’ve been noticing a new spoken expression (a twist of words or language that people say) creeping into the vernacular of the common man. I must say that I most certainly should tell you about it, because like Daron I’ve decided that it may be time for me to start moving in a new direction with my professional writing career, and that decision has had everything to do with this horrible new expression that people say, which is “sausage party”.

I wonder, have you ever heard that one before? Because for all I know it’s been around since the communist revolution (it’s definitely of proletarian origin, anyhow), but I’ve only just now started to hear it around town, and it basically means “party where there’s a lot of men’s private parts” not “party where there’s a lot of sausages”.

It all started with this fellow I know, this completely base, revolting, commoner by the name of Michael Kelly. He called me up and said “Yo, yo, bonesuck (which he calls me sometimes because he knows that despite my great wealth I am not a person who is likely to go about wasting things such as meat off of the bone by throwing it away before I get every little sliver of it off, in fact one could make an argument that perhaps that is one of the main reasons I am very wealthy, because I will do things such as suck bones clean or squeeze out that last little slickard of toothpaste, although I’m sure the real reason is not my thrift, but my great ability to be a writer for the Ned and Daron Report) diz you be hafting to be coming up towards me crib? On account of because we just will are been being hurrying up to have a big ole sausage party up in here.”

Well, sausage isn’t my favorite food, but I do like to eat it sometimes, and I imagined that Michael and his friends had created a relaxed setting where several sausage varieties could be sampled for fun, nourishment, and educational purposes, perhaps on cocktail toothpicks. That picture seemed pleasant to me, so I slipped on my Tallia single breasted Super 100 which I’ve been wearing to most minor social events lately, not because it’s my first choice, but just because I hate coming off as a snob, and I figure that if you can make a little joke with your choice of fashions before anyone else does it for you then it lightens the mood and decreases the potential for jealousy problems, and then I had this guy that I hired to take me over to Michael’s house take me over there.

But as you may have guessed, when I got there I was peeved to discover that the sausages were not neatly arranged with wine and cheese on some sort of tres elegante buffet table, rather, they were concealed within the pants of the four or five smelly workmen who were festooned haphazardly on the couch watching one of their number attempt to best a video game console machine. That was the party, and I thought it was really bad and that Michael was a complete pollock.

Since then I’ve been surprised to hear “sausage party” several more times. I even heard it once on TV (I assume that all the movies that say it are still in production so we won’t be hearing it on the big screen until Christmas or so). But the most disturbing encounter with that disgusting phrase was the most recent one, when a young lady told me that she wouldn’t like to read my report with Daron because she considered it to be “a bit of a sausage party”. That was a gross and nasty thing for her to say, but the worst part wasn’t hearing such filthy sailor talk coming from delicate feminine lips, it was that she thought the Ned and Daron Report is a sausage party. It isn’t a sausage party, you guys, and it never was supposed to be for dudes only. It is also for girls.

So that’s how I know we need to change our whole approach to writing. We need to start letting our other-gendered friends in. I’m not really sure what the best way to do that would be, though.

Do you really think that a bunch of “macho” men want to read about Vin Diesel, a man more muscley than them who uses his bulging-large muscles to shift his NOS-fueled car into high gear, then parachuting out of said car while shooting a harpoon gun at a moving speedboat that is going full throttle? I may not be a true man, but I know that men don’t want to be around when another man shows them up, even if it is just in something they are reading. Maybe, even though are intentions were good, sometimes some of the films we based our reports on were ones that women might not statistically go to see as much as men… and I guess, maybe that would lead some women to feel isolated or sort of left out.

Anyway, the next day, I was hanging out with some more of my millionaire friends, watching Magnum P.I. in my new Esquire home sauna, when I got a phone call from Adm. Duck Ass, inviting me to go see Swimfan with him. Overjoyed at the prospect, I slipped into my tuxedo and rushed out the door. Swimfan is the story of a young high school girl named Anne, played by the lovely Danielle Fishel (Boy Meets World’s Topanga), who moves to a new town and into a new high school, where she meets and falls in love with Zach (charmingly played by Jesse Bradford of Hackers, and The Boy Who Cried Bitch).

After a few months of pure bliss and wonderful afternoon picnics, there is a terrible turn of events when Zach jokingly pretends to drown in their backyard swimming pool, and Anne, overcome with the fear of being left alone, decides to deep freeze Zach so that he will always be by her side.

In the end, she realizes that, even though he can always be around her physically, his heart is and will always be frozen and unable to be full of love for her. In a moment of clarity, she rushes him to the swimming pool to thaw him back into life, but it is too late. He is dead. Distraught by her horrible mistake, Anne turns herself over to God, becoming a Nun at a private Catholic school for girls.

Swimfan was probably my most favorite chick flick (aka human being flick) of the summer. It was tragically beautiful story of unrequited love. How often do we as chicks (humans) fall for the wrong person and do all the wrong things while trying to get their attention? It happens to everyone, but when it happens to you, you’re going to feel like some kind of awkward and uniquely stupid freak, and that’s a guarantee. But we shouldn’t be afraid to love whomever our guiding sense tells us to, no matter how hard it is to sometimes remember that. Sometimes it’s hard not to feel like you’re the one and only idiot who’s ever fallen for the wrong guy. Swimfan reminds all chicks that in matters of the heart they are never alone.

Daron told you a bit about the storyline, but he didn’t mention my favorite character in the movie. Josh, the asshole best friend (played by the toughly named Clayne Crawford who you’ll remember as the asshole best friend from A Walk To Remember) decides to get revenge for his Zach’s death, so he disguises himself as a girl and enrolls in the nun school with the intention of ruining Anne’s life.

Well, the real drama of the movie unfolds as Anne begins to feel strangely drawn to the new girl in school, who is, of course, Josh in a girl disguise. Of course she is very torn by this, and can’t decide what to do with her forbidden lesbian love. In the meantime, all of the slapdash booby traps that Josh sets up for Anne fail comically -- each time he tries to ambush her or set her up for a fall they seem to just end up in each other’s arms laughing, or lightheartedly splashing around in a swimming pool filled with each other’s blood.

Josh is tormented from three separate directions by opposing forces. One, his loyalty to his dead best friend tells him to continue his attacks on Anne, two, he’s beginning to fall in love with Anne, and three, the nuns’ lessons teach him simultaneously not to be such a jackass all the time, and that lesbian love is wrong. It seems he’ll never find a way to do what’s right and also be happy at the same time. The main thing about Josh is the way he points at people when he’s calling them on. You know what I’m talking about, I’m sure. He does that thing where he kind of points down at them with his main finger, but also extends his pinky a little bit (kind of like the horned hand of metal).

I’ll be honest, at first I didn’t really like Josh. I thought Clayne Crawford’s look and style was an obvious attempt at a more commercial, younger, more smoke-free Norman Reedus. I hate when Hollywood tries to water down Norman Reedus for kids or chicks. I was pissed that they didn’t just get Reedus himself for the role, since I thought he would have given it a much grittier edge.

When I left the theater after seeing the movie I was still stewing about things. My friends Mary and Sarah didn’t help, they thought Clayne did a good job. Plus they said they’d never even heard of Norman Reedus, which shocked me, but then those two are girls, and it doesn’t seem like Reedus is in too many chick flicks. I decided that when I talked to Norman later that night (I talk to him every night) I’d see if he could set my mind at ease. So before I got into bed I knelt down and asked him what he thought about Josh. He told me that they’d actually asked him to play the part, but he said that he decided not to ever be in any chick flicks, citing the fact that if you’re a girl, just seeing him on screen can put a baby in you. So that was settled, and I now feel that Josh was a pretty good character to have in the movie.